Daily Devotion

You
Are Not an Accident

By Rick WarrenSaddleback Church

I am your Creator. You were in my care even before you were
born (Isaiah 44:2a - CEV).

You are not an accident.

Your birth was no mistake or mishap, and your life is no fluke
of nature. Your parents may not have planned you, but God did.
He was not at all surprised by your birth. In fact, he expected
it.

Long before you were conceived by your parents, you were conceived
in the mind of God. It is not fate, nor chance, nor luck, nor
coincidence that you are breathing at this very moment. You are
alive because God wanted to create you! The Bible says, The LORD
will fulfill his purpose for me (Psalm 138:8a NIV).

God prescribed every single detail of your body. He deliberately
chose your race, the color of you skin, your hair, and every other
feature. He custom-made your body just the way he wanted it. He
also determined the natural talents you would possess and the
uniqueness of your personality. The Bible says, You know me inside
and out, you know every bone in my body; You know exactly how
I was made, bit by bit, how I was sculpted from nothing into something
(Psalm 139:15 Msg).

Because God made you for a reason, he also decided when you would
be born and how long you would live. He planned the days of your
life in advance, choosing the exact time of your birth and death.
The Bible says, You saw me before I was born and scheduled each
day of my life before I began to breathe. Every day was recorded
in your Book! (Psalm 139:16 LB).

God also planned where you'd be born and where you'd live for
his purpose. Your race and nationality are no accident. God left
no detail to chance. He planned it all for his purpose. The Bible
says, From one man he made every nation and he determined the
times set for them and the exact places where they should live
(Acts 17:26 NIV).

Nothing in your life is arbitrary. It's all for a purpose.

Most amazing, God decided how you would be born. Regardless of
the circumstances of your birth or who your parents are, God had
a plan in creating you. It doesn't matter whether your parents
were good, bad, or indifferent. God knew that those two individuals
possessed exactly the right genetic makeup to create the custom
you he had in mind. They had the DNA God wanted to make you.
While there are illegitimate parents, there are no illegitimate
children. Many children are unplanned by their parents, but they
are not unplanned by God. God's purpose took into account human
error, and even sin.

God never does anything accidentally, and he never makes mistakes.
He has a reason for everything he creates. Every plant and every
animal was planned by God, and every person was designed with
a purpose in mind. God's motive for creating you was his love.
The Bible says, Long before he laid down earth's foundations,
he had us in mind, had settled on us as the focus of his love
(Ephesians 1:4a Msg).

God was thinking of you even before he made the world. In fact,
that's why he created it! God designed this planet's environment
just so we could live in it. We are the focus of his love and
the most valuable of all his creation. The Bible says, God decided
to give us life through the word of truth so we might be the most
important of all the things he made (James 1:18 NCV).

This is how much God loves and values you!

God is not haphazard; he planned it all with great precision.
The more physicists, biologists, and other scientists learn about
the universe, the better we understand how it is uniquely suited
for our existence, custom-made with the exact specifications that
make human life possible.

Dr. Michael Denton, senior research fellow in human molecular
genetics at the University of Otago in New Zealand, has concluded,
"All the evidence available in the biological sciences supports
the core proposition that the cosmos is a specially designed
whole with life and mankind as its fundamental goal and purpose,
a whole in which all facets of reality have their meaning and
explanation in this central fact." (Michael Denton, Natures Destiny:
How the Laws of Biology Reveal Purpose in the Universe, New York:
Free Press, 1998, p. 389.)

The Bible said the same thing thousands of years earlier: God
formed the earth. He did not create it to be empty but formed
it to be inhabited (Isaiah 45:18 GW).

Why did God do all this? Why did he bother to go to all the trouble
of creating a universe for us? Because he is a God of love. This
kind of love is difficult to fathom, but its fundamentally reliable.
You were created as a special object of God's love! God made you
so he could love you. This is a truth to build your life on.

The Bible tells us, God is love. (1 John 4:8) It doesn't say
God has love. He is love! Love is the essence of God's character.
There is perfect love in the fellowship of the Trinity, so God
didn't need to create you. He wasn't lonely. But he wanted to
make you in order to express his love.

God says, "I have carried you since you were born; I have taken
care of you from your birth. Even when you are old, I will be
the same. Even when your hair has turned gray, I will take care
of you. I made you and will take care of you" (Isaiah 46:3-4
NCV).

If there was no God, we would all be accidents, the result
of astronomical random chance in the universe. You could stop
reading this article, because life would have no purpose or meaning
or significance. There would be no right or wrong, and no hope
beyond your brief years on earth.

But there is a God who made you for a reason, and your life has
profound meaning! We discover that meaning and purpose only when
we make God the reference point of our lives. The Message paraphrase
of Romans 12:3 says, "The only accurate way to understand ourselves
is by what God is and by what he does for us."

Editor's Note: You never know just
what kind of impact your words might have -- even enough to change
the heart of an alleged murderer. In Georgia on Saturday,
March 12, 2005, Ashley Smith was taken hostage by Brian Nichols
after he escaped from a courthouse. Nichols allegedly killed four
people. Smith was able to read a portion of Rick Warren's PURPOSE
DRIVEN LIFE to Nichols. As Smith explains, "He said
he thought I was an angel sent from God. I was his sister and
that he was my brother in Christ and that he was lost and God
led him right to me." Nichols later let Smith go and surrendered
to the police.

Rick Warren is the founding pastor of Saddleback Church in Lake Forest, Calif., one of America's largest and most influential churches. Rick is author of the New York Times bestseller The Purpose Driven Life. His book, The Purpose Driven Church, was named one of the 100 Christian books that changed the 20th century. He is also founder of Pastors.com, a global Internet community for pastors. The Ministry ToolBox is for ANYONE serving Jesus Christ. For
a free subscription, you can sign up at www.pastors.com.